The 9 Weirdest Food TV Shows of All Time

In our February issue, the Foodist (a.k.a. Andrew Knowlton) gives a shout-out to the PBS series that made him fall in love with food: Great Chefs. From the early ’80s through the late ’90s, it ran for over 700 episodes (now available on DVD), and each one showed a chef preparing a few signature dishes in a professional kitchen–no running banter, no boring recipes, just pros in their element, doing what they do best.

That’s all well and good for the serious chef, and the Great Chefs series certainly ranks up there with Jacques, Julia, and James Beard in the annals of good food TV. But inspiration comes in many forms, not all of them quite so dignified. Here are some of the lesser-known and far, far weirder cooking shows that have graced the airwaves (and YouTubes) in recent memory.

Feed Me Bubbe:

If you’ve ever wanted to watch a very, very old woman create questionable dishes in her small Boston-area kitchen, this is the show for you! Bubbe (Yiddish for grandma) putters, mutters, and delivers the goods, all thanks to the entrepreneurial spirit of her grandson, who came up with the idea for the show. It’s actually kind of sweet, if hard to watch (and yes, Bubbe has a cookbook).

Thu invites Johnny Appleseed over after running out of apples for a recipe, then travels to Mount Avocado in search of the “White Tiger” apple, battling a viking heavy metal band on her journey.

We would like to see Julia Child do that! Despite her adventuresome ways, Thu occasionally settled down to do some old-fashioned cooking:

The best part of Green-Screen Cookies is that you can fix them in post. Yum!

Close to the Bone: Surgeons and Chefs:

This is pretty much what it sounds like. Chefs, surgeons, and a lot of edible anatomy, plus a dose of hardbody doctor windsurfing footage–turns out the show’s resident surgeon, Dr. Hu, knows how to cut through both cervical fascia and sick waves. Everyone involved in this is Canadian, and an article from Dr. Hu’s medical alma mater reports that the show actually aired on the Canadian Learning Channel in 2004.

In the same article, Dr. Hu said that surgeons and chefs aren’t so different, after all, since both professions require “long periods of training, striving for good results, [and] making sure that things run smoothly in their own worlds.” Good thing, too, since a lot of restaurants don’t provide health care.

Cooking with Beefcake:

Speaking of anatomy, this diamond in the raunchy rough popped up on the Internet a few years back and still holds the title for “cooking show with most background man-butt.” If your workplace is uncomfortable with cheeky banter and…cheeks, then this thing is definitely NSFW.

Cooking with Dog:

This web series is actually a good cooking show–it has high production values, clear instructions, and solid recipes for Japanese food. The only strange part is that gray poodle that’s always sitting on a stool in the background. Oh, and the fact that the poodle is named Francis, and is actually the host of the show, and somehow narrates everything that’s going on while his “assistant” demonstrates how the recipe works. Weird as that may be, Francis knows what he’s doing–the series is still going strong, and just uploaded a new episode a few days ago.

Dutch Oven Cooking with Cee Dub:

Cee Dub is a man who likes to cook things in Dutch ovens on camera, for your benefit, occasionally in almost complete silence. Online videos of his show are hard to find, but tales of Cee Dub have spread far and wide, so this clip of DOCwCD being shown on Talk Soup survives (feel free to ignore Joel McHale).

Strange production values aside, Cee Dub (a nickname for the ex-Idaho Department of Fish and Game Conservation Officer C.W. Welch, who also occasionally goes by “Butch”) does seem to know his way around a dutch oven. Cooking well over a campfire takes a lot of practice, and the fact that the $142 DVD set of his show is back-ordered until late January on his site means that some people out there really want to learn what Cee Dub’s got to teach.

Cookin’ Good with the Cola Sisters:

Austin, Texas, has the nation’s oldest continually running public-access TV station, and it keeps on running so that things like this can exist. Arcie and Shasta, the Cola sisters, don’t actually get much cooking done during the show, but they do kind of amble around in their kitchen in front of a camera, drink, and discuss conspiracy theories.

Let’s Paint, Exercise, and Cook:

Moving even closer to the sanctum sanctorum of public-access TV genius, Let’s Paint is a live show in which artist John Kilduff paints, cooks, and sometimes fields viewer calls, all while slowly upping his pace on a treadmill. In the beginning, the show was just about painting, but one day, when (according to Wikipedia) Kilduff was waiting for a Saddam Hussein impersonator to arrive in his studio, he began to think that painting while on an exercise bike would be interesting. For practical reasons, he settled on a treadmill, but then started adding in cooking and call-ins to spice things up. LA public access shut down in 2008, but you can still watch John streaming live, painting, exercising, and cooking, at his website.

The Huntress:

Ah, but the Huntress is hard to top. With blonde hair and fluorescent vest ablaze, she takes her son to the woods to shoot a squirrel, then brings it home and cooks up a batch of squirrel melts for her family. This clip of Heidi Wilson’s domestic goddessliness is the only one that seems to survive from the show, which did actually air on the Outdoor Channel some time around the turn of the millennium. Heidi co-hosted with another Michigan mom, Lydia Lohrer, and the show’s initial PR release said that segments on archery elk hunting, archery boar hunting, and even archery bear hunting were in the works, presumably with cooking lessons to follow. Huntress, wherever you are, please come back. As long as all those elk, boar, and bear are free-range, and you cook not only their noses, but also their tails, your time to shine is now.